Here cometh the next dark age?

As someone that has always been fascinated by history and the fact that humanity never learns the lessons of the past and seems doomed to repeat the same mistakes, I admit that I have been feeling, for a while now, that the people in charge of this country in particular, but the western nations in general, have been taken us into a direction that will have serious and far reaching negative global implications. When you articulate this, especially to the believers of our credentialed new political aristocracy and the left in general, you get lambasted as someone that must have some kind of vile reasons for opposing the destruction they are inflicting with their failed ideology, and ideology that seems to remain immune to the consequences and results of the failed and often horribly failed policies it keeps engendering. To the true believers amongst that bunch what counts are the feeling and their intentions, and never the results.

To those that simply take advantage of the stupidity and naivete of the true believers, the only results that count are the ones that allow them to get more power and steal more from the productive. So when you find someone that waxes eloquently about this prescient and relevant, it is a good thing and a breath of fresh air, albeit one I suspect will fall on deaf ears of the collectivists and their agenda. Jakub Grygiel at the American Interests has a great piece titled “The Stages of Grief at the Frontier“. I recommend you read the whole thing, but here is his conclusion, and it is an important warning:

Severinus’s story parallels our times (with all the necessary caveats). The stages of geopolitical grief are not as vivid today as in this story, but doubts are growing about the resilience of U.S. power and Washington’s commitment (under the current Administration or future ones) to allies. As U.S. power retrenches or is questioned, the frontier regions then experiences a series of adjustments. Insouciance about how security arises gives way to shock and panic when the security provider vanishes; then, self-delusion follows, as people convince themselves that security will sustain itself or that the threat is not real; and finally, if lucky to be fortified by a firm belief in something more than material goods or the satisfaction of one’s own transient preferences, the polity may find a reason to defend itself. The West may be going through all three stages at the same time, as many seem to put faith in the automatic harmony of international relations, do not necessarily believe in the dangerous nature of geopolitical competition with assertive rivals, and—perhaps most worrisome, and different from Severinus’s tale—do not seem to find a strong reason to devote resources to sustain the order from which they benefit.

Many people don’t realize it, but the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe led to centuries of brutal chaos and repression as the entity that provided order, albeit through its own use of force, evaporated. Whatever prosperity, wealth, and knowledge had been created all but disappeared as people reverted to savage behavior and basically resorted to fighting over an ever dwindling pool of resources and wealth. It took over a millennium for things to start righting themselves, and even after that, we had far more darkness than light until the twentieth century and another series of empires produced the stability and conditions for those that create (and for you collectivists that creation is never by government because the only thing government can provide is a system that delivers stability, with clear rules that apply to all, and government then stays out of the way of their people) to be able to bring us prosperity.

I can talk about this till I am blue in the face, but the thing has been beaten to death, so i will leave you with a quote from someone I think said it just right:

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

Get ready for the dark times. I am sure the collectivists will tell us it was not their fault because they meant well. According to them Nirvana on earth is just a question of time, but every time they have tried it we end up with something horrible and the collectivists telling us that things went wrong because the wrong people were in charge and/or it was implemented incorrectly. Their idiotic belief that they can override human nature, the laws of economics, and reality to have us all act like an insect colony be damned.